WALS is a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials (such as reference grammars) by a team of more than 40 authors (many of them the leading authorities on the subject). WALS consists of a number of maps with accompanying texts on diverse features (such as vowel inventory size, noun-genitive order, passive constructions, and "hand"/"arm" polysemy), each of which is the responsibility of a single author (or team of authors). Each map shows between 120 and 1370 languages, each language being represented by a symbol, and different symbols showing different values of the feature.

The World Loanword Database, edited by Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor, is a scientific publication by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. It provides vocabularies (mini-dictionaries of about 1000-2000 entries) of 41 languages from around the world, with comprehensive information about the loanword status of each word. It allows users to find loanwords, source words and donor languages in each of the 41 languages, but also makes it easy to compare loanwords across languages. Each vocabulary was contributed by an expert on the language and its history. An accompanying book has been published by De Gruyter Mouton (Loanwords in the World's Languages: A Comparative Handbook, edited by Martin Haspelmath & Uri Tadmor). The World Loanword Database consists of vocabularies contributed by 41 different authors or author teams.

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